Weekly Roundup For Your Weekend Reading – April 7

The six things listed in this article will help us think through how we live out the Great Commission in faithful obedience.

“To engage the culture is to be a Christian and a church member, living in but not of the world. It involves finding points of commonality with our non-Christian neighbors, particularly where common grace shines like the sun. It also involves cultivating a holy and distinct culture among ourselves. We are to be a chosen race, a holy nation, a royal priesthood, a people belonging to God (1 Peter 2:9). Such engagement is both humane and heaven-directing…”

This is something I suspect we all have to fight against on a regular basis. Don’t stop reading this until you’ve worked through the section “Our Sunday Morning Idols”.

“What’s your greatest hindrance to worshiping God as you gather with the church for corporate worship? I can think of a number of possible answers: Our song leader isn’t very experienced. The liturgy is too stifling. The band sounds bad. The preacher is uninspiring. Our church is too small. Or, Our church is too big. While I don’t want to minimize the importance of faithful planning, musical skill, and wise leadership, our greatest problem when it comes to worshiping God doesn’t lie outside us, but within our own hearts. It’s the problem of idolatry….”

You may not get the answer you want or think from this article, but you will get two very comforting realities that should shape our praying lives.

“I mean, prayer changes things, right? After all, that’s what prayer is. We present our requests to God and he responds. God answers prayer. We’ve known this since Sunday school. But it also raises some sticky questions. Like, does God change his mind? If God responds to prayer, does that mean he alters his sovereign plan in response to our requests? Or is God like the ultimate chess player – a Kasparov on steroids – answering prayers by outsmarting the devil, the universe, fate, karma, or whatever else he has to outsmart? To prevent us from drifting into heresy or having our brains explode from exhaustion, let’s look at the Scriptures….”